Open Access

Jacques Engländer, Martin Bleider, Jörg Hoffmann

• Nowadays manufacturing companies are facing many different challenges as they are finding themselves in a dynamic and complex environment. Industrie 4.0 and its principles can help to manage these challenges. For example, companies should follow a principle called continuity of engineering. This continuity enables parallel development and production planning. One important measure to allow a continuity of engineering is the appropriate integration of IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology) within the company as well as along the whole value chain. Meant is the networking of machines and plant equipment with IT systems. The management of information resources for example allows data based decisions. Therefore, companies need to have a profound knowledge about the relationship between the integration and information processing of information systems. There is a common understanding that a certain degree of IT and OT integration highly depends on the company’s typology, which we found out can be represented by the company’s business model. Therefore, we developed a methodology to identify the company’s business model and to derive relevant success factors, both based on a workshop-concept. Based on expert interviews, this enabled us to link the business model or company’s typology with the most important information management principles.